HOW DO YOU STRENGTHEN YOUR LOWER BACK AND HIPS?

One of the most common questions people ask is “How do you strengthen your lower back and hips?”

At every gym, you’ll find insanely fit guys doing challenging dynamic resistance training exercises that, if you did them, would lead to some sort of back injury.

Their secret, of course, is years upon years of training—specifically, training the core muscles in conjunction with the upper and lower body.

The key to their fitness is having a strong lower back, as well as strong hip muscles. Your hips and lower back work together to move your lower body in synchronization with your upper body. Essentially, working these muscles and joints will drastically reduce injury risk across the board.

So are you wondering “How do you strengthen your lower back and hips?” You’ve come to the right place!

In this post, I’ll give you some of the best exercises you can do to reinforce these critical muscles and bulletproof both your back and legs against injury.

How Do You Strengthen Your Lower Back and Hips? Try:

Bridge – Bridge is one of the best lower back exercises you can do. It’s not only very safe, but also highly effective at strengthening critical core muscles. It specifically targets your pelvic muscles, hips, and lower back, encouraging more effective movement and greater strength, but it’s a static exercise that is fully safe for anyone to do.

Pelvic Tilt – Bridge involves a static hold with no movement, but Pelvic Tilt takes things up a notch by adding some movement. With the added thrust, you encourage greater strength through both the concentric and eccentric phases of the exercise. There’s also a slight internal movement that will target your pelvic floor and other core muscles.

Plank – Plank is an excellent pose to help strengthen your critical core muscles. Like Bridge, it’s a static position that requires no movement, so it’s very safe for people who are recovering from a lower back strain or injury. You simply hold the pose, and in doing so, engage the muscles in your abs, lower back, legs, and upper body. It encourages better movement and greater strength throughout your entire body, making you more injury-resistant and enhancing your endurance. You’ll find this core-focused exercise does wonders to strengthen all of the muscles that keep your lower back protected against injury.

Bird Dog – Bird Dog is an excellent lower back movement that engages your hip muscles to extend your leg in tandem with your arm. But because you’re extending opposite limbs (right arm and left leg, left arm and right leg), your core and hips have to work double-time to maintain your balance while your limbs are extended. It’s an excellent posture to seriously improve hip strength and reinforce the muscles supporting your spine.

Barbell Hip Thrusters – If you think you’re ready to take your workout up a notch, add in some weight and start doing Barbell Hip Thrusters. This exercise activates the muscles in your lower back, hips, glutes, hamstrings, and quads, engaging all of the core and lower body muscles that work together as you run, jump, and play. You’ll find that adding this exercise into your routine will do wonders to strengthen your lower back and hips.

Lying March – This is an interesting exercise to try if you want to specifically target your hips. Because you’re lying on your back, only your core and hip muscles get involved lifting your legs off the ground. This can lead to highly effective hip muscle recruitment in a way that few other exercises can match. The fact that you’re doing it with no weight means it’s very safe and easy even for beginners. However, if you want to make it more challenging, strap on some ankle weights before you lift.

Marching on the Ball – This is an interesting seated twist on the Lying March. For this exercise, you’ll need a stability ball—sitting on the ball activates your core muscles and makes it more difficult to maintain healthy balance, which means your lower back, abs, and obliques get an excellent little workout. But the focus is chiefly on your hips, which are engaged to lift your legs off the ground one at a time in the “march”. Sit up straight, maintain an erect posture, and let your hips do all the work. It’s a highly effective exercise to develop better hip strength.

Hip-Focused Stretches – Before and after any workout, you should always take time to stretch out your hips. Hip muscles and joints tend to tighten up after a day spent sitting down, because the muscles relax and the tissues contract when not in use. It’s worth taking a few minutes to incorporate the following stretches:

• Butterfly stretch

• Seated Cobbler pose

• Lying Cobbler pose

• Pigeon pose

• Hip flexor stretch

• Leg swings

A bit of stretching will do wonders to facilitate smoother, easier movement and prevent stiffness that could cause you to move incorrectly—and potentially injure your hips.

How Do You Strengthen Your Lower Back and Hips? Become Injury-Resistant With One Amazing Method!

If you’re trying to strengthen your body against lower back injury, I highly recommend our Back on Track program!

Back on Track teaches you everything you need to know about the one dangerous yet often ignored syndrome that is behind so many aches and pains—including back and hip pain. You’ll learn a simple breathing technique that is absolutely game-changing. Thanks to this program, you can take back control of your spinal health and see real improvement in your mobility and pain level.

Give yourself a fighting chance against back pain, and see what our program has to offer. Learning everything it has to share will help you increase the effectiveness of your efforts. You’ve already started asking the right questions—questions like “How do you strengthen your lower back and hips?”—so let us get you the rest of the way to good spinal health!